The impact and challenge of networked politics

I recently discovered a website on Networked Politics, and found this useful summary of the political effects and potential of the internet, by “Hilary’.

Excerpt:

“The leap in the technological possibilities of such communication on a multi-media basis have had several (obvious, I guess) consequences for the potential of the movements, networks and conflicts that constitute and create this non-state public sphere:

i.It has influenced movements and emergent movements to make the issue of information and with it the production of knowledge from this information (processes of developing theories, understandings out of connecting and `making sense’ of information) central to their work and identity. Ask activists in some of the more effective movements and networks, for example the Network Against US Bases, the Southern Hemispheric Alliance which was central to the defeat –so far – of the US’ Free Trade Alliance- what have been the conditions of their success and you’ll find that central to their answer is their capacity to generate knowledge, knowledge of how the power structures work, knowledge of each other, the knowledge with which to develop strategy. You’ll also find that this capacity is the outcome of a steady process of experiment and trial and error in combining electronic communication with physical meetings. The former allows for a regular and sustained global flow of information and discussion, previously impossible. The meetings allow for deeper translations across cultural differences, the establishments of solidarities and trust which facilitate arguments over the internet and allow ( optimistically ;-)) for a deeper level consensus decision-making than is possible on the internet. They also allow for the elaboration of tacit forms of knowledge that only become explicit in the course of physical social interaction.

ii.It has strengthened the sustainability of participatory as distinct from representative forms of democracy and with it the education and self-education of those involved. Of course there are constant problems, tensions and risks of disguised authoritarianism (that we have discussed in the movement line of the Networked Politics inquiry) as well as the fundamental problem of technological inequality. But at least amongst those able to communicate online and occasionally to travel there is in principle the possibility of forms of co-ordination that work without a centralised leadership and that involve consensus decision-making or processes of swarming and convergence without a single plan.

iii.It has created the possibility of sustained networks thriving across and independent of national boundaries yet having the capacity to be everywhere, local to global, simultaneously, and to stimulate or help interconnect popular movements at these different levels. The very possibility of a non-state public sphere is obviously in part a product of the way that political decisions have moved beyond the national level and into an opaque and unspecified sphere. The new and as yet inchoate public sphere is being created as networks and movements chase and expose these shifts in decision-making and in power at the same time taking responsibility for creating, experimentally, new more appropriate and effective forms of democracy .A process which would have been impossible without the internet.

iv.It is important to stress the multi-media nature of the new communications possibilities. The possibilities of internet have radically influenced the more innovative non-digital media of the movements: not only in terms of their journalistic abilities to expose and report but also enabling them editorially able to interact with their readership the activists and intellectuals of the movements and become more directly a tool of the movements, potentially able to play a key role in stimulating connections, providing open space for debate and reflection and developing an transnational media and to do all this in a way which reaches beyond the digital divide which is a significant factor not only on a North South basis but also paralleling the inequalities that cut through the societies of the North. The magazine, newspaper and website Carta in Italy would be a good example here, working with similar magazines across Europe; or Brecha in Uruguay with connections across Latin America would be good examples. Movement education institutions like the MST also illustrate the same potential of combining innovative use of internet technology with material forms of communication.

All these features and more point towards the importance of improving the means of improving the means of communication, reflexivity and self – education as a fundamental for strengthening the autonomy of the movements or more broadly of the non-state public sphere. Obviously, this implies a break from the various movement models which in some ways mirror or imitate the cultures and structure of existing political parties. It does not imply abandoning representative democracy to the political parties of neo-liberalism; indeed without the qualitative strengthening of a non-state public sphere experimenting with participatory forms of democracy, representative institutions are de facto dominated by various brands of the neo-liberalism (the 101 varieties of `Blatcherism’ ) It is movements and conflicts based in such a sphere that potentially have the capacity from their autonomous base and with their social and cultural rather than conventional institutional sources of power, to challenge the structures that constrain and limit even the most radical political representatives. Underlying the aspiration of a non-state public sphere is the importance of developing common values, understandings, organisational, creative and solidaristic bonds across the variety of disaffected and searching networks and associations in civil society. The difficulty and counter-conventional character of this process cannot be over emphasised. The dominant and institutionalised political cultures all serve to destroy such crossing, horizontal relations, to suck all relations upwards into the maelstrom of institutional politics. The effective destruction of the momentum of the emerging movement left created in France around the European `no’ is but the latest example. The history of the left in the UK is littered with skeletons of movements or would-be movements drawn away from their potential base by the institutional pulling power of national parliamentary politics. It is a process which is becoming weaker as the real substance of these institutions itself slips away to global market and intra-elite institutions. But the debilitating impact of the existing political institutions, corrupt and deracinated as they are, can only be effectively countered by giving some institutional strength to an alternative, global, locally and thematically inter-connecting dynamic. The qualitative development of the means of horizontal communications is fundamental to this. But the opportunities opened up through online tools need constantly to be consolidated and developed through institutional innovations in the material world – plus a degree of disciplined caution and sometimes abstinence about direct engagement in from the decaying but corrosive institutions of national politics. In these way I came away clearer than ever that an understanding of the potentialities and ambivalences of the new information technology – in its multiple forms – must underpin our rethinking and our remaking of political organisation.”

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